I'm in Australia and the company I work at has been moving away from hiring in the US and focusing on Australia. Management put out a possibly poorly phrased but informative statement that they found that the Australian developers were just as talented and productive, but "The exchange rate is very favorable".
The culture, language skills, etc are all mostly similar enough that it's not like some random code sweatshop in India.
the key trick is that once you outsource enough of your key competitive advantage - the question arises - what is the company and who creates value - contractors or company management?
why shouldn't these contractors open their own company, do the same work and capture entire value they produce, instead of working for fixed salary?
what is exactly IP in software world?
Your backend app written in Spring with postgres schema like thousands other CRUD apps?
or cookie cutter front-end in React with Tailwind?
I don't think wide moats in form of IP ever existed in software world
The former is challenging and not likely to succeed in many scenarios. The latter is now the default playbook at places I work